How it compares

1. Honest Analytics vs Independent Analytics

   The nearest competitor, and the one whose free edition is most generous. The meaningful difference is how each one decides that two visits came from the same person.

   Pick Independent Analytics if: you sell through something other than WooCommerce or in more than one currency, you want click tracking on arbitrary elements, or you need visitor journeys that span days.

2. Honest Analytics vs Koko Analytics

   Koko is the most deliberately minimal analytics plugin for WordPress, and that is its strength. The question is whether minimal is what you want.

   Pick Koko Analytics if: you want the smallest possible thing that answers how many people read a post, and you would rather have four numbers you trust than twenty you have to interpret.

3. Honest Analytics vs Matomo

   Matomo for WordPress also runs inside WordPress, so this is not a hosting argument. It is a question of how much analytics platform you actually want running on your server.

   Pick Matomo if: you need the depth - segments, heatmaps, session recordings, ecommerce reporting, custom dimensions - and you have the server headroom to run it.

4. Honest Analytics vs Plausible

   Both are cookieless and both keep things simple. The real difference is where the analytics lives, and whether you want a subscription or a plugin.

   Pick Plausible if: you run several sites that are not all WordPress, or you want somebody else responsible for the uptime, the bot filtering and the backups.

Google Analytics is covered separately, on the GA4 alternative page, because most people arriving at that question are not comparing two products so much as trying to leave one.